What are directed activities related to texts (DARTs)?DARTs are activities which get students to interact with texts. Their aim is to improve students' reading comprehension and to make them critical readers. They can be done by individual students or in groups.

What type of activities can you use in DARTs?DARTs can be divided into two groups: reconstruction activities and analysis activities.

Reconstruction activities

Definition: activities that require students to reconstruct a text or diagram by filling in missing words, phrases or sentences, or by sequencing text that has been jumbled.

Texts used: modified texts - the teacher modifies the original text, taking out words, phrases or sentences, or cutting the text into segments.

Types of activities:

Text completion (Fill in missing words, phrases or sentences.)

Sequencing (Arrange jumbled segments of text in a logical or time sequence.)

Grouping (Group segments of text according to categories.)

Table completion (Fill in the cells of a table that has row and column headings, or provide row and column headings where cells have already been filled in.)

Prediction activities (Write the next step or stage of a text, or end the text.)

Analysis activities

Definition: activities that require students to find and categorize information by marking or labelling a text or diagram.

Texts used: unmodified texts

Types of activities:

Text marking (Find and underline parts of the text that have a particular meaning or contain particular information.)

Text segmenting and labelling (Break the text into meaningful chunks and label each chunk.)

Table construction (Draw a table. Use the information in the text to decide on row and column headings and to fill in the cells.)

Diagram construction (Construct a diagram that explains the meaning of the text. For example, draw a flow chart for a text that explains a process, or a branch diagram for a text that describes how something is classified.)

Questioning (Answer the teacher's questions or develop questions about the text.)

Summarizing

What type of texts can you use in DARTs?You can base a DART on traditional language texts like poems and extracts from short stories, novels and plays. You can also base them on extracts from magazines, newspapers, pamphlets etc, and passages from history, geography, science etc textbooks.

What are the advantages of using DARTs?

When students interact with texts, their reading comprehension improves.

They also become more aware of how texts are constructed.

This makes them more critical of texts. They begin to ask questions about the information that has been included in, and excluded from, the text.

And about the words and sentence constructions that the writer chose.

As students' understanding of how text is constructed improves, so too does their own writing.

Research has shown that interacting with texts also improves students' cognitive development.

You don't need fancy equipment and resources to use DARTs. You can use textbooks from various subjects. Therefore, DARTs can be used in under-resourced schools.

DARTs can make your students' textbooks more interesting.

If you teach English in a context where English is the medium of instruction but it is not the students' first language, using DARTs based on passages from the students' textbooks will help prepare them for the texts they will encounter in other subjects.

It will also help prepare them for the types of tasks they will encounter in other subjects. For example, filling in tables, labelling diagrams, completing Venn diagrams etc.

DARTs also help students learn how to use texts without plagiarizing them.

And they help students learn how to produce their own graphic information like tables, flow charts, branch diagrams etc.

How can you develop your own DART?Here is one method you could use:

Once you have chosen the text, read it carefully. As you read, interact with the text. For example, underline or circle important information, write questions which you think the text raises or doesn't answer, list the main ideas and the supporting detail, draw a table or a diagram etc.

Take note of how you interacted with the text. Did the text lend itself to a particular type of interaction. For example, it is often quite natural to develop a graphic organizer when we are reading and interacting with some types of texts. So...

If the text …

you may have developed …

… compared and contrasted two or more things

a table or Venn diagram

… described a process

a flow chart.

… described a fictional or non-fictional sequence of events

a flow chart.

… described how something can be classified

a branch diagram.

… described an object

a labeled diagram.

… presented an argument

a spider diagram or mind map

Decide whether you want your students to do a reconstruction activity or an analysis activity.

Use how you interacted with the text as a basis for your DART.

For example, if you developed a flow chart while reading the text and you want your students to do a reconstruction activity, develop a relevant flow chart and then delete some of the information from the chart. Your students must fill in the missing information as they read. Write the instructions for the task.

Or, if you developed a flow chart while reading the text and you want your students to do an analysis activity, write the instructions that will help them construct their own flow chart. There might be several steps in this activity. Firstly, you might ask your students to underline the steps in the process that is being described. Then you might ask them to draw a flow chart and fill this information in to it.

If you develop a DART, why not use this website to share it with other teachers?

Comments

I often use reconstruction activities based on comics to get my intermediate-level English students to interact with texts. I try to choose a daily comic strip (Calvin and Hobbes is my favorite) that often uses a series of daily strips to tell a story over the period of a week or two. This produces about 5-10 self-contained but related comic strips. I photocopy them, cut them up into their individual strips, and jumble them. Then I have the students put them in the correct order as a gist task. Comic strips are particularly useful because they have pictures to accompany what might otherwise be somewhat dense language (particularly with Calvin).

The students then go on to do some other activity with the strips, usually something with vocabulary. I have them circle picture representations of words that in a different context would be hard to define, or work out the definitions of idiomatic expressions.

Comics also often lend themselves to functions lessons. For example, I recently used a Calvin and Hobbes strip where the main characters have a water fight with a neighborhood girl to teach students some ways to (rather benignly) insult one another. The students had a lot of fun with this and it really got them talking to each other. Not to mention that recognizing and using insults is an often over-looked but necessary function of language, especially here in NYC.